Companies who wrestle with whether their various air pollution-emitting operations must be grouped together for Title V permitting purposes have received some assistance from a recent Sixth Circuit opinion. In Summit Petroleum Corporation v. U.S. EPA, 2012 FED App. 0248P (6th Cir.), the court curtailed EPA’s expansive interpretation of a “single source” under the Clean Air Act.

By rule, operations belong to a single source if they: (1) possess the same SIC codes; (2) are located on contiguous or adjacent land; and (3) are under common control. See 40 C.F.R. § 52.21(b)(5), (6). In addition, by policy, EPA has expanded the definition of “single source” to include not only the facilities that meet these three criteria, but also those facilities that provide support to an adjacent central operation. See Preamble to the August 7, 1980 final Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) regulations, 45 FR 52676; Preamble to Revised Part 51 and Part 70, Draft, February 18, 1998. And, EPA has taken a “functional” approach to the term “adjacent,” such that these support facilities need not even physically adjoin the main facility. For example, EPA considered two aluminum smelter facilities adjacent, despite their 3.4 mile separation, due to the extensive truck traffic between the two properties. See Letter from Steven C. Riva, U.S. EPA, to Robert Lenney, Alcoa Inc., Mar. 9, 2009. See also Letter from Pamela Blakely, U.S. EPA, to Don Sutton, Illinois EPA, re: General Dynamics, Ordinance & Tactical Systems, Inc., Mar. 14, 2006 (several plants considered a single source, despite their 8-mile separation, because they met a “common sense notion of a plant”).

Therefore, when EPA recently considered whether Summit Petroleum Corporation’s gas wells and associated flares should be considered a single source with its gas sweetening plant, EPA did not find it dispositive that several of the wells were located over a mile from the plant and were separated by other intervening properties. Instead, EPA noted that the wells and the plant were highly interdependent and under Summit’s common ownership. As a result, the wells and plant met the “common sense” notion of a single facility. See Letter from Cheryl Newton, U.S. EPA, to Scott Huber, Summit Petroleum Corporation, Oct. 18, 2010.

Summit challenged EPA’s single source determination, and the Sixth Circuit vacated that determination in Summit Petroleum Corporation v. U.S. EPA. The court found it “unreasonable and contrary to the plain meaning of the term ‘adjacent’” that EPA equated “functional relatedness” with “physical adjacency.” Id., at *2. The court ordered EPA to use instead the “ordinary, i.e., physical and geographical” meaning of the word “adjacent.” Id.

This decision will affect long-standing EPA policy and practice in making single source determinations. As the Director of EPA’s Region VIII Air Program noted, there is “no evidence that any EPA office has ever attempted to indicate a specific distance for ‘adjacent’ on anything other than a case-by-case basis.” See Letter from Richard Long, U.S. EPA, to Lynn Menlove, Utah Division of Air Quality, “Response to Request for Guidance in Defining Adjacent with Respect to Source Aggregation,” May 21, 1998, citing 45 Fed. Reg. 52,676, 52,695 (August 7, 1980) (“EPA is unable to say precisely at this point how far apart activities must be in order to be treated separately. The Agency can answer that question only through case-by-case determinations.”). Therefore, companies with “functional” single-source determinations should consider whether the recent Sixth Circuit decision could impact their status under the Title V program.

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